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Wednesday, June 7, 2017

History of Arawn (Part 3)

The Arawn server has a rich history that has been crafted over many years by clans and players that have slipped into legend. In this post I will tell about the course of events that started at the beginning of the game, which led us to where we are in the present day. This is Part 3 of the history of Arawn.Table of Contents:

Update 2.5: Meteoric (January 15, 2012 to May 25, 2012)

On January 20, Amigos merged with BadaBing due to Kooks leaving the game. By this time they had recruited quite a few members into their roster that would go on to help them in the coming years. Among these recruits were Smellyunder (top level rogue), Krazykatz (top level druid), Hitgirl, and Ubs (v2.5 main tank). Badabing grew their membership, and started gearing up their members by contesting at Falgren for dragon discs, and by focusing on Meteoric bosses.

Bubbles had a philosophy that the clan should not have a bank, because banks caused corruption within the clan. Instead, BadaBing was set up so that clan members would keep the drops that they received from bosses. These drops would then be sold back to clan members at a very reduced price, to compensate the seller for the plat items they used to get the boss drop. In the event that no one needed the item, it was allowed to sell the drop outside of the clan. The exception to the rule was Dragon Discs, which everyone needed and the distribution of them was voted on by the clan.

Serenity took a different approach to distributing boss drops. Serenity kept a clan bank where they pooled all the clan's quest items. The Generals of the clan would vote on who should receive these items first based on a number of criteria such as activity, helpfulness, and other determining factors.

Serenity would continue to grow their membership, and would cooperate with Badabing and Celts on bosses by including them in boss groups. The members of the boss fight would distribute drops based on need and attendance, no matter what clan the person was in. Some frustrations occurred because of people in the boss fights selling off the drops. This may have been due to the differences in how Serenity and Badabing were running their clans with respect to drop distribution.

There were two events that started the rift between BadaBing and Serenity. The first was the merger of BadaBing and Amigos, because Serenity had not forgotten how Kooks had behaved in Juppongatana. The second was when BadaBing members Hescheff and Analritter hacked Serenity member Worships account through brute force guessing. Although the perpetrators were kicked from BadaBing, this event began the animosity.

In the beginning of the Meteoric Armor update, all the clans would come together to kill Deadroot because he was too tough for any one clan to kill. Agreements were struck by the leaders of the clans that drops should be shared among the clans participating. This helped gear up all clans to be better equipped to take on the meteor bosses.

Meanwhile, Teaweasel and Crippler came to an agreement and Celts merged with clan Reignfire to make the clan CelticReign on February 7, 2012, with Teaweasel as chief. Teaweasel was one of the first people on Arawn to note the spawn times on bosses, and start timing their respawns. This increased competition upset many people in opposing clans, which strained the relationship many had with boss sharing. Previously, bosses had been more relaxed, and people would form up as the boss was discovered. By timing the boss, it forced people to sit and camp in a group if they wanted to take part in the boss fight.

CelticReign had some internal struggles as well. When the clans merged, not all guardians of Celts and Reignfire were converted into guardians in CelticReign. This demotion caused people to become upset. In addition, there were also some people that did not mesh well with the clan that needed to be booted out.

Excalibur was another one of Arawn's major clans, led by Krypto. Excalibur was created after Krypto was booted from CelticReign. While Teaweasel went inactive on Arawn because of beta testing, and then moving to Crom, Exaclibur was able to recruit members from Celts, taking advantage of their weakened leadership. They were able to build up their membership to take part in high end bosses, and sometimes even taking bosses from other clans with their superior DPS.

CelticReign disbanded on March 10, 2012 when Teaweasel left the game. The clan reverted back to Celts, and leadership was passed to Crippler, then to Savaged1982 (May 14), then to Oyrae, then back to Savaged1982. Eventually, most clan members left to join Uskoci.

There were quite a few exploits at this time in the game that helped people get meteoric gear easier than normal. The first was on Shivercowl, discovered by Zumuclyst. He was located in the room before Incarnation of Donn, and he could be killed by any ranger without taking damage if he was shot at from the steps south of his room. Another glitch that Zumuclyst and Spartikis discovered was that if you ran through a meteor boss, you could sometimes glitch them so that they would not attack you back. This could be used on most any meteor boss. The third glitch was if you double tap on the attack button, you could interrupt any skill cast. This glitch was discovered by Krypto in v1, but he kept it to himself until it was discovered and fixed in the v3 beta test. The fourth glitch discovered by Xeon was that you could move a boss's reset point if you used two characters to cross-aggro a boss, and logged one out, and then the other. Doing this you could tow a boss to a more favorable position where there were no adds.

Some people felt that glitching the bosses was cheating, while others thought it was just exploiting a game mechanic. Eventually, KrazyKatz and Serenity were able to find out the glitch from watching Xeon and started using it themselves. Eventually, it got out of control and people were using it to glitch bosses and level up on them using knowledge elixirs. This led to bad feelings, and Teaweasel took to the forums to persuade people to stop glitching bosses. however, it did not stop until Raven told OTM about the embrace and ranger glitches. OTM fixed them shortly after.

It should also be noted that a big part of the game at this point was being able to stay online even though you were "away from the keyboard" (AFK). Because of this, people would park their characters at a mob's spawn point, turn on auto attack, and leave their character parked there for days at a time. This caused some tension between people because you could never tell if a person was actually online, and some people would get mad when the AFK character didn't answer them. Another concern was that people who were actually playing could not get to the mobs that were being camped AFK, which made it hard to level up. The most popular spots to AFK at were the Drybones room in the catacombs, the trees around Spearhorn where two druids would spawn, the grove of trees between Starspell and Charfire, and any spot in the druid pit in front of Falgren. At any given time, there would be people standing on top of every druid spawn point in the druid pit, making it impossible to level up. It also put druids and mages at a disadvantage because they have weak weapons and armor, and do not have a strong auto attack.

At the end of update 2, Falgren was hotly contested by Serenity, BadaBing, Celts, and Excalibur. People would camp for hours and hours at the same spot just to kill him, because Dragon Discs were so hard to come by. This would cause clans to "rush" bosses. This means that opposing groups would start attacking a boss before anyone could get set up to kill it in an organized way. This approach is quite commonplace now because of target lock, but was irregular for the time. There was no target lock at this point in the game, so the groups attacking the boss would keep hitting it and hope that they did the most DPS to get credited with the boss kill. There was no way of knowing who was going to get the drops from a boss until the boss was dead. "Rushing" bosses caused quite a few arguments in game and on the forums.

Another topic that caused arguments was that people could solo bosses if they had enough restoration potions. At this time, potions had no cool down timer, and could be used one after another. By spamming potions, a single person could solo many bosses. The warrior Hitgirl was notorious for being able to kill bosses like Rockbelly and Spearhorn by herself.

Besides opposing clans grouping each other at bosses, the different clans would help each other out in other was as well. In one instance of friendship, when Nightingale got his Connacht Magus set scammed off of him, Celts came together to buy him another set even though he was not in their clan. Another good deed was when SirWinston from Serenity gave Smellyunder of BadaBing the last Black Remnant of Space he needed to become the first rogue on the server with full meteoric armor. You could say that the atmosphere was respectful between clans, even though certain people didn't like each other and would talk trash.

Many Serenity members went inactive at the end of update 2, due to the grind of XP mobs in

Stonevale being exactly like what they went through previously in the Catacombs. As people reached the level cap, the only mobs that gave experience were the rarely spawning "gem holder" versions of the meteor bosses. At the end of Update 2, Serenity had about five active members. Most people had either quit, or created an alternate character and joined Uskoci.

Speedwerks was known for running around Stonevale KSing people with his Winterking Hammer. It led to someone creating a character named "SpeedsMom" to taunt him pretending to actually be his real life mother.

When you leave the Otherworld you are teleported back to the Stonevale farm. This idea was suggested by Teaweasel in the Update 3 beta test. He can also be credited for the development of many of the skills found in the Otherworld.

Energy shield was changed to shield from a set amount of damage, instead of draining all energy. This idea was put forward by Drizzt in the Update 3 beta test.

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Author Details

Hi, my name is Goodies and I'm a druid on the Arawn server. These days I mostly play on Rosmerta as a clan member in Forever.
I have been playing Celtic Heroes since October 2011, and I am currently a forum moderator. You can message me on the forums at Bitey.